Article coming out in JEU revue de théâtre

JEU, a theatre journal in Québec, asked me to write an article about the Festival interculturel du conte de québec, founded and directed by my friend Marc Laberge. They wanted the perspective of someone from outside the quebeçois storytelling movement. I've been a big fan of storytelling in Québec, both in French and English, ever since I heard the incomparable Jocelyn Bérubé thirty years ago. Until I met Jocelyn, I had never dreamed that the art of storytelling could be so rooted in traditional stories and so avant-garde at the same time. He remains, for me, one of my all-time storytelling heroes - one of the greatest lyric storytellers in the world. Over the last thirty years, the storytelling renaissance has developed rapidly, and one of the places where it has found the richest soil is Québec. Storytellers there are experimenting with repertoire, performance styles, audiences, venues - and as a result they have attracted some wonderful younger tellers.

The piece is called Les fusées improbables: notes sur le Festival interculturel du conte de Québec, (translated by Michel Vaïs) and is coming out in the next issue of JEU (www.revuejeu.org), which is devoted to storytelling.

Radio documentary on CBC Radio Tapestry

CBC Radio One's show Tapestry recently aired (on Easter Sunday) a radio documentary about my experience as a father with a baby in the neo-natal intensive care unit at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children. Ines Colabrese was the producer, and she brought together extensive interviews to create a fifteen-minute piece. It includes the remarkable story of my neighbour, Liliane Scarpellino, who brought across the street her life-affirming story just when we most needed to hear it. You can catch the documentary at CBC's archives: http://www.cbc.ca/tapestry/archives/2009/041209.html

This was the hospital experience that led to the creation of Talking You In, a canta storia about storytelling in the NICU, which is set to the music of Brian Katz.

Stories and Borders

Found this while I was digging around my UNICEF files. A few years ago I was UNICEF Canada's storyteller-in-residence. I still like this short description.


STORIES AND BORDERS

“The story is our escort,” says African writer Chinua Achebe, reminding us that today’s world is full of borders. They are drawn on maps and in minds. They separate countries, groups, and generations. But stories escort us into new territory. They carry a safe-conduct and pass freely through every frontier. A story can begin in English, travel for awhile in Ojibway, grow Arabic roots, wear Xhosa robes, and wind up in Chinese. Aladdin came to Quebec and became a trickster named Ti-Jean. Wherever stories are told and valued, they help humans communicate the things that most need to be remembered. “You must invent your own literature,” writes Vivian Paley about a class of four-year-olds (in The Boy Who Would Be A Helicopter) “if you are to connect your ideas to the ideas of others.” Stories cross time as well as geography, sharing their wisdom across generations. A story, they say, is a letter sent to us from yesterday. When we receive it we add our own message and send it on to tomorrow. Long before humans fought over borderlines in the sand, we laughed together at storylines around a shared fire. Story is our first language, our universal Mother Tongue.

Check out The New Quarterly winter issue

The winter issue of The New Quarterly has just come out. I have a piece in it called Chaucer By Heart. It is a tribute to Marvin Mudrick, my literature professor at the College of Creative Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. It is also about the value of knowing poetry by heart, in this case, the Miller's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. At one point in my life, I memorized the whole thing, all 600 lines of rhyming Middle English couplets. This is probably the most useful thing I've ever done. Having that much Chaucer in my head has proven to be an excellent companion on the road, good counsel at troubling moments, and a great way to get through my laps in the swimming pool. Check out www.tnq.ca to find out more about this fine Canadian literary journal.

News from Grant Land

Just received the welcome news that I was given a Chalmers Arts Fellowship from the Ontario Arts Council. The grant will fund a year's worth of travel, research, thinking, and storytelling around the theme of whether a new myth is coming to life through the voices of the contemporary storytelling renaissance. There's a Gaelic saying that "every force evolves a form." I'm curious to explore the nature of the force that evolved the form of modern storytelling. The grant will help me travel to Hudson Bay to talk to Pennishish about his Omushkego myth-cycles; to Sao Paulo to talk to Regina Machado, one of the world's great thinkers about story; to British Columbia to spend time with Robert Bringhurst. I'm also hoping to interview Laura Simms, Sean Kane, Ursula LeGuin, Kay Stone, Bruno de la Salle, Ben Haggarty, and other storytellers, scholars, and imaginers. Not quite sure what the fruit of this journey will be - maybe an audio journal, or series of talks/tellings, or essay. 1,001 thanks to the Chalmers family for endowing the fellowship, and to Ontario Arts Council for helping artists undertake new adventures.

Check out the National Post on October 16 to read my gentle revenge on CBC radio. Itah Sadu and I pitched a storytelling show to their new program development committee, but the pilot episode had too many folktales for their taste. Today, Yashinsky strikes back! Link: www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=883210

Storytelling with Nexus Percussion ensemble

From October 8 - 10 I'm performing with the great percussion ensemble Nexus at a symposium called Talking Drum, at the University of Toronto. We're doing a mix of material, including A Praise for Listener, set to their mbira piece "Tongues." This praise-poem is from my book Suddenly They Heard Footsteps - Storytelling for the Twenty-first Century, from the chapter titled "Dreaming A New Myth." We're also doing How Heart Came Into the World, set to cow-bell accompaniment, and The Land of Those Who Were Thrown Away, a story from Zimbabwe that Nexus improvises behind. It could be every storyteller's dream to jam with these astonishing musicians. Final performance in this series is Friday, October 10, 7:30, at Walter Hall, Faculty of Music, St. George campus of University of Toronto.